Treatise on the Nomadology: Axioms, Propositions, and Problems

Axiom I: The war machine is exterior to the State apparatus.Proposition I: This exteriority is first attested to in mythology, epic, drama, and games.Problem I: Is there a way of warding off the formation of a State apparatus (or its equivalents in a group).Proposition II: The exteriority of the war machine is also attested to by ethnology (a tribute to the memory of Pierre Clastres).Proposition III: The exteriority of the war machine is also attested to by epistemology, which intimates the existence and perpetuation of a “nomad” or “minor science”.Problem II: Is there a way to extricate thought from a State model?Proposition IV: The exteriority of the war machine is attested to, finally, by noology.

Axiom II: The war machine is the invention of the nomads (insofar as it is exterior to the state apparatus and distinct from the military institution). As such, the war machine has three aspects, a spatiogeographic aspect, an arithmetic or algebraic aspect, and an affective aspect.Proposition V: Nomad existence necessarily effectuates the conditions of the war machine in space.Proposition VI: Nomad existence necessarily implies the numerical elements of the war machine.Proposition VII: Nomad existence has for “affects” the weapons of a war machine.Problem III: How do nomads find or invent their weapons?Proposition VIII: Metallurgy itself constitutes a flow necessarily confluent with nomadism.

Axiom III: The nomad war machine is the form of expression, of which itinerant metallurgy is the correlative form of content.Proposition IX: War does not necessarily have the battle as its object, and more important, the war machine does not necessarily have war as its object, although war and the battle may be its necessary result (under certain conditions).